A few years ago, I bought a couple of domain names for my dad’s business – one of which is the exact name of the store and the other is the shortened version, as it is commonly known. My dad had a website built, and about two years ago, he had Verizon re-design and manage the site, as part of his advertising with Super Pages.
Because it’s a local business, my never really focused on building a highly interactive website. IMO, the main point was to have a website to inform people of the business who use the search engines or SuperPages.com. I figured that as long as there was information about the business, the brands carried, the store hours, and contact information, all would be good. I never paid much attention after the site was launched.
Last week, out of curiosity, I installed a tracking code on the website, and I began to see how people were finding his website. There wasn’t a lot of traffic (under 20 UV/day), but a good enough amount that it might be important to re-design the site. I was able to see that most people were finding the site via Google searching for the name of the store, and most had IP addresses that were local to the store. I also saw that some people are searching Google for industry keywords plus the city or region. Finally, I noticed several Google searches for a couple of long tail keywords that are important to the industry.
Interestingly, my dad’s small business is ranked in the top 10 for these two long tail industry keywords, and I also saw that the keywords in .com were deleted. I decided to register the names and am now going to see how I can leverage the domain names to help improve this ranking. I am not an expert in this area, but even if owning the keywords don’t help the store, at least someone else can’t register and develop them, which would hurt the store’s ranking for these keywords.
I think website analytics is a neat way to locate solid keyword domain names, and I plan to do some searching through my websites to see if I can find any unregistered keyword terms.
How would you leverage a keyword domain name to help boost the traffic to a developed website?
Frankly I don’t fully understand the techniques described in this article, but it is about using 20 keyword sites to push one site into a dominating SERP:
http://www.bluehatseo.com/serp-domination/
For your purposes perhaps you could have a clickable banner linking to your father’s store above the fold which says “for KEYWORD click here” and below the fold could be all the text that gets it to a decent SERP, and this format could be repeated on every page.
I’d treat that kw domain as an affiliate site. Get it to rank but all the links point to your dad’s main site.
I’m going to be at domain fest talking about SEO for domainers – perhaps we can grab a drink?
I would put a small 3 page mini site up and textlink the keyword of the domain on each page to your dad’s site.
Then get these mini sites listed in directories and a few blogs related to the product. When listing your name on comments in the blog use the keyword(s) instead of youre name.Ofcourse name the mini sites webadress. But I am sure you know this.
Greets
Duane
Spending time setting up dozens or hundreds of the sites.. Is it really worth it if they are only searched for maybe 50 or 100 times per month if that?
Just owning the domain name and making sure one of your competitors doesn’t have it is good enough. I wrote about this in one of the early “development” focused articles on my web site… This is what a lot of smart developers have always done.
It is how you “dominate” a niche. If and when you are serious about expanding, you can do so easily with setting up all of those whitelabel sites… It will have to involve lots of manual SEO and COPYWRITING though.
Best,
Mike
http://www.wannadevelop.com
To be honest I don’t understand all the points in this article, but it explains the way to use 20 KW mini-sites to boost the SERP of a single site:
http://www.bluehatseo.com/serp-domination/
For the two sites you have you could have a banner taking up the entire above the fold space which drives traffic to your Dad’s site. Below the fold (on every page) would be the content that drives the SERP.
(PS I submitted this comment twice yesterday and it disappeared and didn’t show as submitted to moderation).
Elliot,
I have recently ended up helping a couple friends with small stores. What tracking code did you use and would you recommend it?